Читать книгу Chocolate Busters: The Easy Way to Kick It! - Jason Vale, Jason Vale - Страница 10

Put simply, addiction is a mental and/or physical hook, hence the expression ‘hooked’. Addiction is an emotion and the emotion is fear. Any substance which creates the fear that life wouldn’t be the same without it, that you wouldn’t be able to cope with and/or enjoy your life the same way without it, is an addictive drug. So does mass-market chocolate fall into this category? You’d better bet your chocolate bottom it does.

Now clearly addiction has its levels and I realize that not everyone who eats chocolate is like Maureen Young (the woman who used to get through 200 bars of chocolate a week), but the fact that so many people are buying this book because they want to stop eating it is surely proof of its addictive nature. I mean, even if you loved them, you wouldn’t need to buy a book entitled The Simple Way to Stop Eating Sardines if you wanted to stop eating sardines, would you? There aren’t any ‘sardine patches’ or organizations such as Sardine-olic Anonymous are there? Yet there are ‘chocolate patches’, there are people who run their lives with a Chocoholics Anonymous way of thinking, and there are thousands of people spending God knows how much on therapies such as acupuncture and hypnotherapy in an attempt to free themselves of their craving for chocolate. If it were their genuine choice to eat chocolate, then surely they could simply make a genuine choice not to eat it – couldn’t they? So is it possible that some Derren Brown-like activities have been at work to make people believe it is their choice when really they have been mentally hooked?

With that in mind, I think the addiction part is pretty clear. Fortunately, 99% of the hook is mental, created by years and years of clever marketing; the actual physical withdrawal (if you can even call it that) you will simply not notice. However, like most addictions, let’s not underestimate the power of the emotional hook because it is this which drives the fear.

FALSE EMOTION THAT APPEARS REAL

The fact is the GODS, through clever emotional advertising, emotional conditioning and mood-altering chemicals (yes, there is a physical part), have managed to create a powerful and emotionally driven food. As such, people become mentally and physically ‘attached’ and in many cases getting rid of chocolate proves as difficult as ending a relationship; they literally feel fear at letting go and so are ‘hooked’. Luckily, the emotions created by the marketing and the chemicals are all false, they just appear real. After all, what on earth can possibly happen to you if you do stop eating chocolate? Your heads are hardly going to explode and you are certainly not going to starve. So any fears you may have about getting rid of chocolate from your life are completely false. That said, when something appears real it then is real to that person.

The only way to kick the chocolate – and be happy about it – is fully to shatter those fears and see this stuff and its pushers for what they really are. With that in mind, let’s really start to unwrap the industry by taking a long hard look behind the advertising and conditioning before we unwrap the many layers of the product itself.

One of the most famous lines with the word Mars in the title has got to be that from a very insightful John Gray – Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus – but it’s still not a patch on the most successful one ever used. I don’t think there’s a single person, in the UK at least, who doesn’t know …